I love AOC part 2

[Yonadav]

Or, just don't be lazy and use Google.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ocasio-c...faq-2019-2

I'm disappointed to see the new left spinning already.  I think the original line was probably just poorly thought-out-- but to see them tap-dancing like that is just the same old politics she's supposed to be against.

I like that OAC is going after super-PACs and corruption, and I like in principle the intense focus on environment and green jobs.  I'm even a supporter of welfare in general.  But I wouldn't support unconditional welfare for people who don't want to work, for sure.

I think that unconditional welfare makes quite a bit of sense. Most people want to do productive things. It would be good to have people not be afraid of losing their social safety net if they do some work. Some people have conditions that make them just about unemployable. And it would be a good thing to have an unconditional safety net that would place people in a stronger bargaining position.

Plus, I am a little dubious about this idea that everyone has to work. Doing what? Who needs this many fast food restaurants? Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out ways to make life a lot less expensive so that people actually can choose to work a whole lot less? Wouldn't that be better for the environment? Do we even know what 'productivity' is anymore? It's not productive to do jobs that should maybe be left undone. No thank you, I don't need fries with that.

And then there is the problem with the way that we do hand out welfare. The biggest welfare program in the US is the Earned Income Tax Credit. It was turned into a big welfare program by Bill Clinton who kicked the the unemployed and the disabled off of welfare, and gave the money to people who do work instead. It was a wildly popular move because it gave working class poor families a bunch of money and elevated them further above the unemployed and disabled whom they despised.

This immediately seemed a bit unfair to working class poor people who didn't have dependents. People who were doing the same job were suddenly being paid unequally. Workers at the same job who had children were suddenly being paid $500 per month more than single workers. I had employees at the time this stuff first kicked in. The earned income tax credit was paid once per year with the tax refund. Poor working class families would get a $6000 lump sum. They were very insensitive about that big payday. They beat their co-workers who didn't get it over the head with it. We actually had to start making rules about not discussing tax refunds at work.

Why did that seem so unfair? For one thing, it was robbing some poor workers and giving their money to other poor workers. While a poor worker who pays some income tax knows that some of their money goes to welfare recipients, it doesn't feel good when that welfare recipient is your co-worker who is bragging to you about money being taken from you and given to them. Secondly, it completely destroyed the idea of equal pay for equal work. People with children were being paid more to do the same job. And when childless workers said anything about that, they were denigrated as evil people who don't care about the children.

How severe was this income disparity? Well, let's look at the case of minimum wage employees earning $7.25 per hour. The worker with no children is going to pay about $300 per year in personal income tax. The worker with two children will receive about $6000 from the EITC.  One worker makes $15,000 per year, and the other one is paid $21,000 for the same work.

And then there is pretty strong evidence that the EITC is keeping wages low. People are accepting low wage jobs specifically to be eligible for the EITC. In fact, in recent years, it has become popular to discuss increasing the EITC rather than raising the minimum wage. It is likely that these types of discussions are exactly why the minimum wage has not been raised in 10 years. So the EITC has been used to further impoverish workers with no children. The $7.25 that a childless worker earns is worth about $6 when compared to what it was worth 10 years ago.

Now consider the EITC as corporate welfare. The EITC is subsidizing the lousy wages being paid by employers that no one wants to work for. A lot of these jobs are work that no one would be willing to take at the wage being paid by the employer. People with children are induced into taking the lousy work for the wage + EITC. Otherwise, the employers wouldn't be able to get employees. Viewed in this way, the money is actually being given to the employer to pay the employees. And there is a lot of talk about raising the EITC. The bigger it becomes, the more it becomes like people being told that if they want their welfare money (rather than a job paying decent wages), they have to go do awful things for Fucky McFuckface who thinks its wonderful that the government is paying people to do lousy work for him.

So I think that it would be a great equalizer to just give everyone money through a negative income tax. If you don't want to work and you are able to figure out a way to live on the small tax credit, then more power to you. You're doing the rest of us a favor by increasing our bargaining power and you are also probably living a really low carbon life. Most people are going to want more than that. At some point on the wage scale, a higher tax rate will have to kick in to make up for the negative income tax.